Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday May 20, 2010 @02:37AM
from the cattle-computing dept.

CWmike writes "Reducing energy consumption in data centers, particularly with the prospect of a federal carbon tax, is pushing vendors to explore an ever-growing range of ideas. HP engineers say that biogas may offer a fresh alternative energy approach for IT managers. Researchers at HP Labs presented a paper (download PDF) on using cow manure from dairy farms and cattle feedlots and other 'digested farm waste' to generate electricity to an American Society of Mechanical Engineers conference, held this week. In it, the research team calculates that 'a hypothetical farm of 10,000 dairy cows' could power a 1 MW data center — or on the order of 1,000 servers. One trend that makes the idea of turning organic waste into usable power for data centers is the moves by several firms to build facilities in rural locations, where high-speed networks allow them to take advantage of the cost advantages of such areas. But there are some practical problems, not the least of which is connecting a data center to the cows. If it does happen, the move could call for a new take on plug and play: plug and poo."

When I go to my company's toilet, it has two different flushes: 1 for urine and 2 for solids. I guess now we'll need a 3rd option - Gas collection. "Insert hose into hole to begin procedure"

1 megawatt is really not that impressive. Put another way 1 cow makes 100 watts. So if I wanted to run my central AC (10,000) I'd need to squeeze 100 cows in my basement, plus hire several dump trucks to move tons of feed to my location. Not exactly an energy reduction.

I can confirm what the poster says. When I travel down their way, I pass several dairy farms. Go even further into the County, which has a large Amish population, and you have farms everywhere you look.

There are a few farms near me but nothing on the scale that Lancaster County has.

Another source might be chicken farms. There is one about a mile from where I live and sometimes, when the wind is just right, its odor wafts my way.

I wonder how hard is to create a closed artificial environment with cows, plants that feed them. All powered with sun for the plants and manure for everything else; including the robots that manage everything.

Too logical. Same thing as electric cars: you get the illusion of not depending on petroleum by increasing the distance between you and the gas pump.

True, electric cars are not zero-emission vehicles but emission-concentrating vehicles. But concentrating emissions has the advantage that it's easier to increase efficiency and decrease emissions on a couple coal power plants than on a thousand cars.

No, silly, we'd feed them with grass and/or grain grown with fertilizer made with other fossil fuels. This appears to be just a way to use the energy in the BS (bovine stool) from existing dairies. If we took cows out of the loop entirely, people would have no milk to drink because apparently, soy milk is not milk [findlaw.com].

Oh, I'm really sorry, I misunderstood completely. I thought cows would be hired as personnel in energy plants which would have created an unemployment problem maybe, as I was told that coal is not a replacement for oil [coalisnottheanswer.org] and I think that oil workers are not easily requalified as milk producers. Thanks for making it clear for me.

It would be more efficient, although more economical is less certain. You will then need to find some way of reducing the market for cattle products, such as milk, leather, and meat, or another farm will simply expand and you'll be wasting the same amount of usable energy.

How much energy is required to collect the waste and move it to the burning facility? Also, how much methane and CO2 is emitted when the energy is extracted from the waste? The calculation needs to take the entire system into account, not just the cost of the electricity.

How much energy is required to collect the waste and move it to the burning facility?

To use a common Australian term - shitloads of energy. However since it's very easy stuff to move you get several shitloads of energy back per load of shit especially if you can get gravity to do a lot of the work for you.As for methane - that's your fuel so almost nothing is released. As for carbon dioxide - not much since methane doesn't have much carbon and you get far more energy per unit of carbon than longer chains of hydrocarbon.In fact this is all so easy that many sewerage treatment plants have been burning methane for power for decades, not to mention a lot of the stuff was used in WWII. As a primary source of power huge hydro and coal plants are of course a lot cheaper but methane has been cheap enough to use in specific circumstances for a very long time.There's not much better for "green" credentials than methane - even the coal industry is busy chasing environmental funding with coal bed methane since less CO2 is released per Watt that way than just about everything (only about twice the CO2 per Watt of a theoretically perfect nuke plant that has never been built yet - nukes run off processed rocks too guys which means NOTHING has zero emissions).

many sewerage treatment plants have been burning methane for power for decades

I visited the local plant years ago, and they had special designs in their 13-stories-deep shit silos so that the top would fly off in case of an explosion, but no way to capture and use the methane. Their rationale was a cost-effort-gains ratio. The local "dump" runs off its methane though (and you get a 10 minute speech about how they're different from a dump if you call it a dump in front of them).

2. The technology is ridiculously simple. I was teaching Indian villagers to build bio gas plant ages ago when I was just a sophomore in college. Essentially dig a 25' deep 10' dia well. Cover it with plastic/metal sheets. There is a rudimentary stirrer turned once a day by the cows themselves. That is all that is needed to handle about 10 dairy cows.

3. The manure has methane, organic fertilizer and smelly substances mixed up together. All you need to d

What I want to know is, how much soil depletion would occur now that the manure isn't going back into the fields as quickly? I've also wondered how much depletion would occur if we converted switchgrass and other leftover farm products into ethanol.

...here in Germany and Austria, where a lot of larger farms invested into a biogas plant; they sell the electric power they generate to the national grid, at slightly preferential rates. One large farm, my last client, runs a 500 kW plant, without anyone making a fuss or being amazed about it.

So how do you say "I, for one, welcome our bovine overlords" in German?;-)

I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.

I mention that because I've read stories of other countries doing what you're doing in German and Austria. In the Netherlands, for example, I've read of manufacturers that operate in such a way that the waste and by-products of both farms and factory are integrated in a near-closed loop not only with respect to materials, but also energy production.

The conclusions from these case studies is that location is key. While that may be true, I'm left wondering why, if location is so important, shipping by rail isn't just as cost effective? Certainly it's good to have things close, but the city of Chicago was built around the processing of cattle that were shipped from other parts of the country directly to "factory" spurs, and the finished "product" distributed from. If shipping by rail is cheap enough for cows (and similarly cheap for coal, oil, corn, water, among any number of other products), why wouldn't it be cheap enough for cow (or any other kind of animal) waste?

I've long wondered about the short-sightedness of modern farming practices where farmers need to buy both seeds and fertilizer each year to produce a crop, when once upon a time in the not-to-distant past, both were free, and in the present, the abundance of animal waste has become an environmental problem.

Once plants and animals were raised together on the same farm -- which therefore neither produced unmanageable surpluses of manure, to be wasted and to pollute the water supply, nor depended on such quantities of commercial fertilizer. The genius of America farm experts is very well demonstrated here: they can take a solution and divide it neatly into two problems.

One trend that makes the idea of turning organic waste into usable power for data centers is the moves by several firms to build facilities in rural locations, where high-speed networks allow them to take advantage of the cost advantages of such areas.

If 10,000 cows can produce 1 megawatt of power, which is 1,314 horsepower, surely it would be more efficient to use the output of 1,314 horses running on treadmills instead? That's about 1 horse to 7.5 cows, meaning big savings on space which is great for a data-centre. Even greater efficiencies could be had if the waste from the horses was used in the manner intended for the cow waste.

Don't even think about using hamsters in wheels though, because they'll only generate a useful 1/2072 horsepower [allexperts.com] each, which means you need about 2.7 million hamsters to generate 1 MW. I think the overhead of cage and wheel cleaning would become prohibitive at that point.

If you decided to use horses, you would have to make a setup to move horses on treadmill. Horses which sit all day, will eat extra food.Now with cows, all this poo is anyways going to be there. Cows give milk, thats the main product. Its just that the waste also is being put to use.

Put those cows on land that also has windmills or solar, and you start to benefit from bigger efficiencies.But what they are talking about is using manure that is already being created now that might be wasted or used inefficiently otherwise. You're going to have the dairies and feed lots anyway, why not put it all to use?

I assume we can also use other magnets to rotate the magnets in the cow's stomachs, and use them for data storage! Ok, right now 1 bit per cow might seem a bit low, but we're working on that. We might consider describing the capacity as 1Mb (one moo-bit), for marketing reasons.

"HP engineers say that biogas may offer a fresh alternative energy approach for IT managers. Researchers at HP Labs presented a paper (download PDF) on using cow manure from dairy farms and cattle feedlots and other 'digested farm waste' to generate electricity..."

Well, you probably dont want to have your servers depending on cows (or any other animals). There are some circumstances that they will fail:

animal disease (e.g. mad cow disease). government might order to kill them to spread its growth.

crop failure, crop prices. cows depend on food, if a crop failure/desease happens, crop prices will go up, so will be their food, as probably their poo as well.

Beside that, bio-energy does not count the CO needed for stuffing the animal with food, so you might to count all the chemicals, fuel and machinery a farmer will use to grow that animal into account.
Given those unreliableness, you would have to have a long time backup energy for that (like it would take time to get new, uninfected animals in case of an disease).

That given in account I would'nt go for poo-energy and stay with an alternative mix of green energy.

Could something like this be done with human waste? If you have an office complex with several bathrooms, it seems like it would be more efficient to either have the plumbing go straight to the processing area (or to have a fan sucking out all the gas), than to hire people to shovel it into a truck and drive it to the center. (Of course there may not be enough employees to power all the servers, but it still seems more efficient than the alternative)

Farmers spread the manure from their animals back on the fields as a way to maintain field fertility. They're not likely to want it shipped off and used to power a server farm, as that will just increase their chemical fertilizer costs.

Cow manure is obviously produced from plants that have been grown using fertilizer to provide - amongst others - phosphorus. Since we're rapidly running out of phosphate, I think it's an absolutely brilliant plan to burn it.

I have read about some Manure digester projects in MN, that allowed farmers to make a bit more selling electricity thank milk. http://www.mnproject.org/e-biogaslinks.html [mnproject.org] - not the article but had some interesting reading.

This is another one of those schemes whereby you take a waste product with zero value (and zero cost) and use it for something productive. Sounds exciting because you are getting something for nothing. Two examples of this kind of thinking come immediately to mind, with the first being biodiesel from waste restaurant oil. The second from a bit further back in history is bird guano.

Bird guano was originally viewed as just a nuisance - a substance without purpose. Only it is rich in potassium which is nee

But in essence, I agree (I mean read my handle). So I want to rephrase your question a little.... Ok given our current cow-poo management policies, it seems like it would make sense to get electricity from it, but if people we to stop eating cows, drinking, milk, dedicating land to cows, the land and water that is used for raising cattle (and growing grain to feel the cattle), could be used much more effectively. I think in order to be fair, we need to compare a cow-poop scheme to a growing mustard, and producing biodiesel from it scheme.

Of course given that we are engaged in this wasteful misuse/abuse of animals, I don't see anything wrong with using the poop. I would surmise that the energy generate from cow-poop is less than the energy needed to run the tractors to feed the cows. But I'm not anti-poop digestion at all. I think humanure is probably one of the greatest sources of untapped energy.... (insert human poop jokes here) But seriously, why aren't we looking at running data centers (or at least their generators) off humanure? Centralized poop collection must become culturally acceptable!

Ok given our current cow-poo management policies, it seems like it would make sense to get electricity from it, but if people we to stop eating cows, drinking, milk, dedicating land to cows, the land and water that is used for raising cattle (and growing grain to feel the cattle), could be used much more effectively.

Our current manure management policies are to improve digestive efficiency of the feed given to livestock, thus decreasing the quantity of manure produced, and then to use the manure as a source of fertilizer to grow more feed. What exactly is wrong with that. Farms were "Green" before being green was cool. Furthermore, you obviously have no idea as to how much surplus food is generated in the country. A large portion of the US grain production is in fact exported. I've always seen that as evidence that we are using the land very effectively. We can feed the entire US population along with a significant portion of the rest of the world. There is a reason that the Midwestern US is referred to as the "World's Bread Basket".

Of course given that we are engaged in this wasteful misuse/abuse of animals, I don't see anything wrong with using the poop.

I'll start by asking you a question. How many farms have you visited? How many animals have you personally seen abused (and I tend to discount PETA & HSUS's video's seeing as they are not above abusing the animals themselves [furcommission.com], or creatively editing the videos [feedstuffs.com] to make things appear worse than they are). I have personally worked on half a dozen dairy farms, and visited at least 15 others. Routinely abused animals produce less milk, and thus are unprofitable. Anyone routinely abusing animals goes out of business in very short order. Hell even the most efficient farms spend months and occasionally years at a time selling milk at a loss because bulk milk prices drop below production costs. In the swine industry (where I work now) they just got off of a run of ~18 months of hog prices being below production prices due to increased input costs for feed (ethanol has more than doubled corn prices) and fuel and reduced demand (swine flu, which is not actually a risk but fear is irrational).

As for the original article:

I think this is an excellent idea. It could be used as an incentive for ISPs to offer higher bandwidth connections to rural areas, where many are still stuck with dial-up. It benefits the farmer because he can get higher speed connections for data transfer (many proposed animal tracking programs require a lot of data be sent in for tracking purposes fairly quickly), they also get money from the server farm for the electricity generated. The farm gets a rural location (potentially more secure), potentially cheaper electricity, cheaper land costs and taxes. The local community gets access to higher technology, and potentially higher paying jobs. Workers at the facility get the benefits of lower cost of living. It's potentially a win-win-win-win situation, assuming that the efficiency of electricity generation and facility construction costs work out.

The energy that is wasted producing meat and milk would be far better used to grow crops that humans can eat directly.

I agree, but it is much easier to increase the efficiency of farming than it is to make humans give up its products. I'm a vegetarian, but I'd need a much more convincing argument than that to give up cheese. By using power generated from byproducts of farming (which, by the way, a lot of farms do already, so this isn't really news), we can increase the efficiency of farming and reduce the environmental impact of meat and dairy consumption now, rather than in a hundred years once we've convinced everyone to become vegan.

We are not supposed to be carnivores

I'll have to have a word with my intelligent designer about that, and ask why he gave me these canine teeth that look like they're designed for tearing meat apart...

(Cue the knee jerk reactions from the 'intelligent' Slashdot crowd, who have never thought any of this through in their entire lives...)

You must be terribly disappointed with the responses; one agree, one "agree, but...". For my part I'd agree that it's clear that growing plants then eating them is going to be more efficient than growing plants to feed to animals that we then eat, but I think it's more realistic to seek to increase the efficiency of farming animals than just give up on animal products.

not to mention completely unnatural (you cannot have 6 billion carnivores or omnivores, of the size of human beings, living on a planet the size of Earth) [...] We are not supposed to be carnivores.

The unnatural part is that there's so many of us, which is enabled primarily by agriculture. Before we started farming, hunting (and the implied eating of meat) was a major source of energy-dense food and we're 'supposed' to be omnivores; we didn't fuel the massive expansion in the size of our brains by eating grass/leaves, bark and roots like the other apes. Fruit has more energy, but it's not the most dependable food if you're foraging rather than farming.

Now that we do have agriculture, maybe we could survive quite well on plants alone, but that's the result of a few thousand years of improving farming methods and selective breeding. The hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution prior to that have set us up as omnivores, not vegans, and therein lies the flaw in your plans - generally speaking, any idea to improve society that requires people to act against their nature isn't going to work out, no matter how much sense it might make that things would be better if they did. See also communism ("Let's share" is nice enough, but people don't work that way en masse).

Hell, even while agreeing that it would be more efficient to just farm plants for food, I'm thinking that I don't want to give up meat... it tastes really good and I like eating it. That in itself is something of a demonstration that we're designed to eat the stuff; if we weren't built that way then why would so many of us want to carry on eating it?

There is nobody supposing us to be anything. Biologically, we are not carnivores because we can digest things that are not meat. We are also able to digest meat. That makes us omnivores.

You make a good case that meat production has a higher per-calorie cost than crops, but when you then go on to say what kind of organism we are "supposed to be", it kind of damages your point.

Also,

you cannot have 6 billion carnivores or omnivores, of the size of human beings, living on a planet the size of Earth

Interesting. You refer to sustainability in the long term, of course, since there are over six billion omnivores the size of humans (and several larger alpha predators such as tigers) living on Earth. Like, right now.

What simulation models and parameters did you use? What per-calory post is the limit for sustainability? What potential technologies, such as artificial protein cultures, new sources of energy, etc. affect this?

methane was a bad gas last week?
Still is if you release it into the atmosphere, especially if it came from somewhere where it has been locked up for centuries.
As fuel, though, it can be a good thing, especially if you got it by having some grass suck the carbon out of the air before using a cow to convert that carbon into an easily-usable form such as methane.

how are you going to trap 10,000 cow farts? i know they are talking about digesting manure here, but i remmeber reading a rabid anti macdonalds article somewhere about how cow farts are contributing to global warming.

First of: the mayor part of the methane from cows come from the burps. Also it wouldn't be that hard to collect methane I think. Methane is lighter than air so just put some kind of collector in the roof that then seperates the methane from the rest of the air (obviously easier said than done; I reckon it's still doable though)

how are you going to trap 10,000 cow farts? i know they are talking about digesting manure here, but i remmeber reading a rabid anti macdonalds article somewhere about how cow farts are contributing to global warming.

Youtube is being stupid right now, so I'm not sure if this will show what I want it to show, but they had an ep on Dirty Jobs where they visited a farm that did just that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QvUBkVfHZM [youtube.com]